Critical Realist Discourse Analysis vs discourse analysis

The CRDA methodological approach draws on the tradition of ‘multi-level synthesised’ discourse analysis (c.g. sec Edlcy and Wctherell 1999; Riley et al. 2010; Sims-Schoutcn and Hayden 2017). More specifically, it combines discourse analysis with principles and practices that derive from discursive psychology and applied critical realism. Discourse analysis is an umbrella term for a group of methodological approaches that are generally grounded in some form of social constructionism. These approaches share (1) a focus on analysing language, and (2) an understanding of knowledge as socio-historically specific, as produced through social processes, and as linked to social action (Burr 2003). The term ‘discourse’ itself is most commonly associated with the work of Michel Foucault (2002 [1969]). However, a variety of approaches that seek to analyse the semiotic content of social interactions have been developed across the social sciences and humanities. Discourse analytic approaches generally assume that (social) reality is not an unproblematic given but, rather, that (social) phenomena are constructed in assemblages of language and practice which together constitute a particular ‘discourse’. For example, the pain of childbirth might seem to an undisputed, unmediated, and wholly natural fact, but social constructionists might point to a popular book that rejects the term ‘contraction’ in favour of ‘rushes’ in order to rcconccp-tualise it (Gaskin 2002). Discursive psychology is a particular strand of discourse analysis that was developed by Potter and Wctherell (1987). Whilst discourse analysis focuses on how people construct the world and make sense of themselves by drawing on common sense discourses and ideologies (Billig 1989, 2001), discursive psychology, in line with conversation analysis, is concerned with the interactional accomplishments of talk (Hepburn and Wiggins 2007). For example, in their study on racist discourse in New Zealand, Potter and Wctherell (1992) identified different interpretative repertoires by means of which culture was flexibly and locally constructed to perform various types of activities.

Finally, Bhaskar’s critical realist approach draws both on constructionist claims about the role of social processes in constituting the social world and the realist position that people’s actions will be influenced by personal, societal and institutional mechanisms that arc independent of (or at least irreducible to) their understanding (Bhaskar 1989; Sims-Schouten and Riley 2014). Thus, unlike ‘hard’ social constructionists, critical realists assert that the social world is also made up of non-discursive structures that have an impact on people’s lives irrespective of whether they arc (fully) aware of this. Bhaskar’s dialecticiscd version of critical realism (‘dialectical critical realism’) suggests, furthermore, that causal mechanisms (whether discursive or non-/extra-discursive) must be situated within a dialectically interconnected totality which includes within itself historical processes and concrete events (Roberts 2014; Scambier and Scamblcr 2015). Some of these claims have been developed further by other critical realists. For example, Banta (2012) has placed discourse in a dialectical relation to the wider realm of social relations, thereby analysing it as a causal mechanism that is involved in the generation of social phenomena alongside other (non-/cxtra-discursivc) mechanisms (also see e.g. Fairclough 2010; Flatschart 2016; Joseph and Roberts 2004). In this way, it becomes possible to argue that social phenomena arc created through the interplay of discursive and non-discursive factors.

In accordance with this approach, the CRDA approach that this chapter proposes views non-discursive factors (embodied, material and institutional) as causal mechanisms that operate alongside discursive factors. The starting point for this position is the idea that, while people draw on a set of (culturally specific and potentially contradictory) common sense discourses to make sense of reality (in line with Potter and Edwards 1999; sec also Billig 1991), both this talk and the wider forms of discourse in which it is embedded occur within the generative boundaries of embodied, material and institutional factors. This claim is informed by the anti-anthropocentric view that discourse docs not constitute or create our world independently but, rather, that it coconstitutes the realities that we experience (see also Nightingale and Cromby 2002). Non-discursive aspects linked to embodiment (e.g. post-natal depression), materiality (e.g. family income) and institutions (e.g. educational systems, employer’s maternity leave policies) arc therefore understood as shaping the constructions that people adopt and live through and as having an impact on their discursive utterances. In this way, CRDA is able to incorporate both the discursive and the non-discursive aspects of being by engaging in a systematic, phased method of analysis. This phased approach incorporates (1) the rhetorical strategies that participants employ (by drawing on discursive psychology), (2) the wider discourses on which participants draw to make sense of themselves, and (3) participants’ embodied, material and institutional contexts, including how these provide the conditions of possibility for sense making (Sims-Schouten and Riley 2014).

In order to study the beliefs, constructions, and ideologies around motherhood, then, these need to be analysed in light of the complex, diverse and multi-layered realities of women’s lives (Laney ct al. 2015). With regard to the development of motherhood, gender, and female employment over the past 150 years, this chapter will argue that this has been influenced by three main factors. These are (1) the role of governments and their various policies and forms of legislation, (2) the role of psychology, especially psychological models of motherhood and attachment (e.g. Spock and Needlman 2012; Van Oudenhoven and Wazir 2006), and (3) the role of the feminist movement and its various ‘waves’ (starting with the first feminist wave in approximately 1860). All three could be understood - in CRDA terms - as a kind of scaffolding milieu, providing insight into the conditions that give rise to how mothers account for themselves and their choices regarding female employment, day-care, and motherhood. The next few sections will provide an overview of these three factors.